EKGaming Wants To Help Publishers Profit From Used Games

You know all those whiny comments from publishers and a lot of prestigious developers about them not being able to make a dime off the secondhand market even if they make hundreds of millions of dollars (or sometimes billions) on a game from new sales alone? Well, a new site that offers users trade-ins and used games will be listening to those whines and will be providing extra incentives to go back to the publishers for used game sales.

EKGaming is a new online retailer that wants to improve the "circle-of-life" for video games, enabling publishers to garner up to 10% from every one of their games that are sold through the online service.

It's not just the publishers who will benefit, gamers are in for some extra gaming-loving, too. EKGaming will offer gamers 20-30% more for every trade-in due to the low-overhead of having an online business, and that's not to mention 30% on a trade-in is a heck of a lot more than what you would receive at GameStop.

According the CEO of the new startup, Mike Kennedy...

“Publishers are spending record amounts of cash on new game development. This increase in dev costs is steering them in directions that don’t necessarily jive with gamers, causing them to take less risks on new and potentially exciting IP’s or game mechanics and sticking with tried and true properties that are more of a guarantee.

"We want to share our used game revenue with them so they can continue investing in new gaming experiences without worrying about the negative effects used games could be having on their operation(s).”

It never really made sense to me how used games makes publishers spend more money on crap people will play once and then never play again. I mean, Dungeon Defenders is a highly replayable game and cost a heck of a lot less than something like, say, Twisted Metal. So wouldn't it make more sense for publishers to focus on replayable, long-lasting titles as opposed to cheap Hollywood-style blockbusters?

SwitchGames tried this before, offering developers and publishers incentive bonuses on used game sales traded or exchanged through their service, but there hasn't been a whole lot of talk about whether or not publishers and developers are benefiting that much from the service. The only thing we hear about is how they want in on GameStop's $1 billion worth of used game sales.

Anyways, if you want to help support your favorite publisher, like Capcom, Electronic Arts or Activision, you can do so right now by buying your used games from EKGaming's Website.